Sunday, April 26, 2015

DANCE MUSIC OVERLOAD: Sonicnet column #1

Sonicnet, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

There's a record
store in downtown Manhattan that always strikes me as some kind of metaphor for
the state of dance music. The store is choked with vinyl, chock-a-block. The
wall-racks are so densely layered with 12 inch singles, the records overlap
so you can only see a narrow strip of
each sleeve's right side---the artist name and track titles are concealed, you can't just scan the walls to find what
you want, you have to peer up close at the price label, where the store has
helpfully printed the information in tiny type. The record bins are so tightly
crammed you can barely extract the discs from their sections, sleeves are torn
and vinyl scuffed. Underneath the shelves, there's an overflow of back stock
extending so far out into the aisles that customers have to put a foot up on
top of the vinyl sprawl just to get near the bins or the listening decks. And
at every deck, there's a tense-looking, sweaty kid in headphones with a fat
stack of new tunes, skipping through the tracks with the stylus and trying to
make judgement calls based on four seconds of intro/four seconds of groove/four
seconds of breakdown, all in the desperate attempt to keep up with dance
culture's Niagaran torrent of product.

This record store is
just about the only one left in New York
that still tries to stock every kind of

dance-floor oriented music, all the myriad subgenres of
house, techno, trance, drum and bass, and breakbeat. (Its one concession to
sanity: skimping on experimental electronica and CDs). Others Manhattan stores
have narrowed their focus to just hard techno, or just deep house, or just
jungle. But precisely because of this
particular store's valiant attempt to
encompass all the tributaries of the post-rave delta, it's getting harder to
use the place, so overcrowded is it with records and customers trying to get at
them. And that's where the metaphor bit comes in, because this mirrors the
increasingly challenging nature of
attempting to navigate the electronic dance music universe, with its
bewildering profusion of styles and its hyper-productivity.

Ten years ago, when rave first started to take off in North
America, it was still physically possible to monitor the best output of every
subgenre--a full time job, sure, but do-able if you were dedicated and
determined. There weren't that many scenes to check, after all--everything was
under the umbrella of house music back then, even techno. Today, it would
take all your time and energy to stay on
top of drum & bass, or minimal techno, or garage, or any single genre---such is the
high turnover of releases, the vast
number of independent labels and self-released records. This double whammy of
stylistic splintering combined with ever-increasing volume of releases is the
reason why people increasingly get on a
narrowcast track and become obsessed with just one kind of music. Take trance, for instance. Until a few years ago I'd always thought it
was a homogenous and basically unified genre, but all of sudden, that same Manhattan store had an entire wall of trance divided up into
a myriad micro-genres. Then I met this English psychedelic trance DJ and,
curious whether she checked out stuff outside the psy-trance ghetto, asked what
she thought of hardtrance warrior
Commander Tom, progressive trance god Paul Oakenfold, and others. She just
looked blank. Clearly, to be on top of
your shit as a psy-trance DJ, you have to have tunnel vision focus.

Diagnosing the dance vinyl glut, it's tempting to bandy
around phrases like "cultural overproduction" or "excess of
access." But it's not like the do-it-yourself boom is generating mountains of mediocrity that
are snowcapped with one percent brilliance. No, the problem is there's too much
good stuff out there-- well-made, intelligently conceived, tastefully executed,
and pretty deserving of your attention. The same cheap music-making technology
that causes the do-it-yourself phenomenon to
keep on mushrooming is also
allowing people to make studio-quality records at home. An unexpected side effect of all this
abundance, though, is a sort of optical illusion--the landmark records don't
stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness. It also means it's harder
for producers to make money, with average sales of a good (i.e. not a huge anthem)
12 inch in most genres hovering between 1000 and 2000 (and that's globally).
Many producers only make tracks to boost their profile as DJs (which is where
you can actually make some dough).

As demanding as it is
for consumers faced with dance music overload, there's no turning back the
clock -- the DIY genie is out of the bottle.
Ultimately, do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself, both as ideal
and as practice, has been fantastic for music. It just means that you
have to abandon the notion of keeping tabs on all the good stuff from across
the genrescape, accept that you're going to miss great records. One aspect of
the DJ's job--and almost a justification for the fat fees these guys charge-- is
their processing function: sifting through the pretty-decent stuff and finding
the nuggets of genius, stringing the pearls together as a stellar set or
slamming mix-CD. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.

Meanwhile, the last time I went to that store, the
over-stuffed-racks were almost falling of the walls. I'm waiting to read about
the first record retail catastrophe: Aspiring Disc Jockey Crushed By Vinyl.

[inspired by this oral history of Liquid Sky, NYC techno record store / rave-wear boutique, and sudden fit of nostalgia for the dance record stores I frequented in the 90s and early 2000s - Breakbeat Science, Sonic Groove, Satellite, and one on 14th between 3rd and 2nd whose name escapes me (Drop?).

The scene was so healthy that it could afford to specialise and fragment - there was even on dedicated just to psychedelic trance, run by a couple of Israeli expatriates

What was interesting to me about these stores was that they were cultural hubs - not just places to buy music, but to pick up flyers for raves and clubs, to buy clothing (especially early on most of the store also had a boutique section to ensure sufficient revenue stream), or just hang out.

Satellite was the overcrowded store described in this piece - and funnily enough about a year after I wrote it, it moved to much larger premises further down Bowery, on the other side of Houston, where all the catering business equipment stores used to be. The new premises were dimly lit, roomy, great wide aisles, and lots and lots of turntables. Clearly the owners had realised it was at the point of utter dsyfunction in the old poky premises. Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the dance vinyl business, and they had closed down by the mid-2000s. But not before winning an "award" from Village Voice -

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Reach a certain age and you notice a peculiar thing
happening: your thoughts frequently get interrupted by nonsequitur memory
images, seemingly insignificant but disconcertingly vivid. It’s as if your
overstuffed brain is calling up ancient files with a view to deleting for
space. Boards of Canada
offers a more benign version of this temps
perdu recovery process. Somehow the Scottish duo’s signature sounds--those
glistening melody-trails and misty-around-the-edges textures--trigger buried
memories. I’d almost say that listening to Boards of Canada is a form of
therapy, except that the emotions stirred up are too plangent--painful beauty,
sweet sorrow--to deserve a term that now has such glib feel-good
associations.

BoC have ploughed this “memory-work” terrain on
their previous two albums, the home-listening electronica landmark Music Has
A Right To Children (1998) and its only-slightly-less-fabulous
sequel Geogaddi (2002). The Campfire Headphase pursues the same
effect but with slightly different means. For the first time the group have
incorporated acoustic and electric instruments, like guitars, alongside their
customary array of vintage analog synths and digital samples. So they’re no
longer making electronic music but an unclassifiable hybrid. Occasionally the
new hues don’t seem as idiosyncratic as their patented faded-Super8-film synth tones,
but then again, there’s a thin line between developing your own vocabulary and
coining your own set of clichés, and we should probably applaud BoC's attempt
to extend their palette. If the gorgeous mind-ripples of “Satellite Anthem” and
the dewy-eyed dreamwalk of “’84 Pontiac Dream” represent classic BoC almost to
the point of redundancy, “Dayvan Cowboy” steps off the group’s beaten path. The
track risks bombast with its stirring strings and crashing cymbal
rolls (which dazzle the ear, as if the sticks are splashing into a pool of
mercury) but stays just the right side of overblown.

Blurring the boundaries between rock and techno is
a smart move, because BoC have always
made music that deserved to appeal beyond the electronic audience. You can
imagine fans of My Bloody Valentine/Cocteau Twins-style dreampop falling head
over heels for Headphase, or devotees of the Cure and Radiohead
wallowing into its exquisitely textured melancholy. BoC can also be seen
as heirs to the psychedelic tradition, grandchildren of Syd Barrett and the
Incredible String Band. The connection comes through not just in the duo's
obsession with childhood or their frankly goofy song titles, but also in the
stereophonic delirium of their production. On the “Oscar See Through Red Eye”
and “Slow This Bird,” sounds pan back and forth across the speakers, the
drift and swirl making you melt into a voluptuous disorientation.

Boards
Of Canada

Geogaddi

(Warp)

Uncut, 2002

by Simon Reynolds

There's
long been a strain of electronic music that's not fixated on the future but
obsessed with the past--specifically, childhood. You can hear it in the naive melodic refrains
and spangly-tingly music-box/ice-cream van chimes of early Aphex and Mouse On
Mars, or, more recently, on recent
albums by Fennesz, Tagaki Masakatsu, and Nobukazu
Takemura, with their evocations of endless summer and bucolic bliss. Boards of
Canada didn't invent this "idyllictronica" genre but they definitely
codified it on their 1998 debut Music Has
the Right To Children--from its title and
cover imagery of faded family holiday snaps to its quaint synth-tones
(redolent of the perky-yet-wistful electronic interludes heard between mid-morning
TV For Schools programmes). Even the group's name is a reference to the
Canadian educational films they saw in secondary school.

"In
A Beautiful Place Out In The Country"---the title track of the EP they released in 2000 as a stop-gap stop for
their devoted cult until the long-awaited second album--featured children's
laughter and a rapturously vocoderized
entreaty to the listener: "join a
religious community and live out in a beautiful place out in the
country." Yet the music made by duo
Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison--who
actually live in a kind of artist's commune in the unspoilt wilds of Scotland--isn't actually
that idyllic: at least, not in a pure unalloyed way. There's something unnerving, at times
downright creepy, about BOC's ability to
unlock the listener's memories.

There's
been times when I've had something close to out-of-body experiences while
listening to BOC, carried away by an involuntary flood of images that are
emotionally neutral yet charged with significance. A sort of mysticism of the
mundane and municipal: reveries of concrete walkways and playgrounds with fresh
rain on the swings, allotments and spinneys, canal-side recreation areas
wreathed with morning fog, housing estates with identical backgardens and young
mums pegging wet windflapped sheets on the clothing lines, clouds skidding
across a cold blue winter sky. I'm never sure if these my own buried early
childhood memories from the late Sixties, or just false memories--either
dreamed or absorbed from 1970s episodes of Play For Today. Sometiems
an even more uncanny possibility suggests itself: what I'm seeing on the screen
of my mind's eye are actually other people's memories, as if BOC could somehow
tune into the memories of complete strangers the way Scanner samples mobile
phone conversations.

Arriving
almost four years after the debut, Geogaddi is basically more of the same only more so. The
artwork offers kaleidoscope images of rosy-cheeked seven year old girls, and
the teetering-off-pitch synths sound even more like washed-out Super-8 films.
The only really new aspects this time round are the increased intricacy of the
production (some of the tracks are so densely infolded they're like
mille-feuille pastry) and a more pronounced fondness for the human voice. This
can range from clearly decipherable soundbites (like the snippets of nature
documentary voice-over on "Dandelion") to drastically treated vocals
(on "Gyroscope", the sample's so distorted and compressed it's like
the little girl trapped inside the TV in Poltergeist) to vocoder-like FX (the ecstatic android
plainsong on "Music Is Math"). There's even shades of White Beatles in "a is to B as b is to
c"'s collage of shortwave and
backwards-run vocals.

Ironically,
the best stuff here--shatteringly poignant tracks like "1969",
"The Beach At Redpoint", "Sunshine Recorder"--is BOC sticking to their exquisite formula: crumbly smudges of textures and miasmic melody-lines drifting like memory-gas over breakbeat
rhythms that are like slowed-down jungle (processed to sound ultra-tactile, but
stoically trudging like a elderly shire horse).
Geogaddi's few departures sometimes stray into gnarly Autechre-like
abstruseness. Successful steps outside their own norm include "Julie and Candy" (which
sounds like Loveless if Kevin Shields had tried to achieve the sound in
his head armed only with a recorder and a toy piano) and "Alpha and
Omega" (which recalls Holger Czukay's "Persian Love' with its Indian
flute-motif, tinny ripples of tabla, and shortwave noises). Another unusual
track is "The Devil Is In The Details," which sonically embodies the
title with its ominous micro-sonic intricacies and hallucinatory texural
vividness: crinkly percussion possibly
sampled from spashing water, a vocal noise like a muezzin miaouw, and a
foreboding synth-motif I can only describe as "glinky".

Then
again, the idea of development and progress may be not just irrelevant to
Boards of Canada but somehow dissonant with their very essence. Recalling
Proust and Nabokov's doomed project of retrieving "lost time", BOC's
seem obsessed with uncovering "the past inside the present" (a sample
on "Music Is Math"). As troubling as it is therapeutic, the music of
Boards of Canada seems to reach back
into your own prehistory and part the mists of time. Somewhere inside that fog
of frayed and faded memory lurks a beautiful and terrible secret.

Friday, April 17, 2015

A riff on 'Extreme Music and the appeal thereof' from 2007, which was written for someone else's book but not ever actually used, the time-wasting twat-head (said affectionately but with an under note of annoyance)

EXTREME MUSIC

What is the attraction of extreme music? What can
"extreme" even mean nowadays, when the outer limits in every
conceivable direction seem to have been probed? Besides, extremity depends on
context and expectation. If
"extreme" has any meaning at all,shouldn't it be in reference to extremity
of affect, the intensity of what the listener experiences? But then, as we can
all surely attest, it's often the softest songs, the most gently seductive and
caressing sounds, that cut you up most cruelly. Bursting into tears is a pretty
extreme reaction to a piece of music, but I can't think of any noise record or
avant-garde work that has done that to me. Whereas Al Green's "I'm Still
In Love With You" or The Smiths' "There is A Light That Never
Goes Out" infallibly devastate. The
most recent thing to make this grown man sob was Kraftwerk's "Autobahn",
an innovative piece of music on many levels, but not really "extreme"
or noisy, on the contrary, all euphony and Beach Boys-like honey to the ears.
What choked me up wasn't the poignant
melody but the sheer aesthetic majesty of it, the spirit behind the work.

Conversely, I once fell asleep in a Galas
concert (and I was a fan and admirer of her music!). The singer was aiming to
conjure Old Testament levels of affliction, abjection and grief (the work was
inspired by AIDS as a modern day plague). Yet the undifferentiated pitch of
mind-rending anguish had the effect of lulling me into a doze. On the level of
affect, Galas's work was on the same level as Mantovani. Or a mug of Horlicks.

Nonetheless I remain obsessively drawn to the abstract
and out-there in music, and I'm not exactly sure why. That's not unusual: often
there seems to be a gap between the reasons we give for liking or validating
certain kinds of music and what's really going. With noise, free jazz/improv,
avant-classical, et al, there's a tendency to talk in terms of subversion or
challenge, an assault on staid sensibilities. The music is envisioned as an
edifying ordeal, a salutary and spiritually uplifting violation that will
expand the listener's horizons. But in this scenario it's always some Other
that is being tested and transformed; by definition, we are the the always already
expanded. If you approach
a work of art expecting to be challenged, you're no longer in a place where that
can happen.

Terms like
"innovative", "groundbreaking", "pioneering", are
equally problematic, because once you get past the first few listens, the music
necessarily becomes familiar; what was abstract and amorphous starts to take on
a shape, ceases to be disorientating. It's impossible to repeat the shock of
the new.

This is even more the case when we listen to avant-garde
music from a long time ago--Varese's pre-World War 2 compositions, the early
musique concrete of Pierres Henry and Schaeffer, Stockhausen's elektronische
works, or, in rock terms, Velvet Underground, early Throbbing Gristle, et al.

So what is going on when we go back as
listeners to experience a past breakthrough? Is that sensation even
recoverable, given that the present we inhabit is one where the breakthrough is
taken for granted, commonplace, perhaps
even institutionally sanctioned to the point of seeming worthy.

Clearly there's
a large element of projection by the historically-informed listener, a kind of
mental restaging of the moment of bursting through into the unknown. Curious
and paradoxical this may be, but it's absolutely integral to my enjoyment of
the music. Indeed it results in an arguably unreasonable bias against
contemporary artists working in those fields, on the grounds that, however
accomplished their work is, they are
settlers not pioneers; what Philip Sherburne calls an après-garde.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

my assertion of being compulsively drawn to the extreme is somewhat in contradiction to the opinion that Extremity is passe as voiced in this Over-Rated of 1997 bit (but then consistency is the hobgoblin of etc etc) which ran on the old Website Blissout aka A White Brit Raver Thinks Aloud. I wonder if you can guess who the unnamed opponent that is not-strawmanned-not-at-all-actually at the start of the piece?

EXTREMITY

There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities

(global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv

to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to

Tresor is a famous Berlin club located in a vault that was once the safe of a department store. Maybe because the temperatures inside this strobe-blitzed sauna reach tropical levels, the techno made by DJ's and groups associated with the club (and gathered on Der Klang Der Familie) is sweat-less and cold-as-ice.

The Berlin sound as represented here has a similar clinical-but-crazed vibe to the stuff coming out of Detroit on the Plus 8 label, like F.U.S.E.'s "F.U.": basslines that pulsate in sinister wave-forms like radioactive ore, rigorous programmed beats, synth-twitches that instil a strange ectastic dread. Unlike UK hardcore's epileptic basslines and sped-up vocals exploding like fireworks, this music doesn't speed-rush forwards in blind propulsion; the repetition seems to take you deeper and deeper towards something primal and not a little threatening.

Voodoo possession is the model here, rather than the hyper-hyper exhiliration-whizz of breakbeat house. "Drugs Work" by System 01 is like venturing into a cyberdelic jungle, parting wave after wave of foliage towards some secret, pagan grove. Maurizio's "Ploy" is a cloud of oscillations and wave-forms that's almost beyond dance. Voov's "It's Anything You Want It To be And It's A Gas" assembles programmed rhythms and grids of sequencer pulses into a percussive lattice of near-symphonic complexity. Mind Gear's "Don't Panic" is simply symphonic, rivalling the poignant grandeur of Orbital's "Belfast". A brilliant compilation.Planet Core Productions's Frankfurt Trax offers more German vanguard techno. Abbreviate the label's name to PCP and you get a good idea of the vibe of the Frankfurt sound: mad-as-hell, mental-as-fuck, apoplectic/apocalyptic frenzy, all stomping 4/4 beats and gut-busting bass-blasts. Mescalinum United's "We Have Arrived" is a storm-trooper stampede with a smeared, blaring riff that'll rip your entrails out. With its infernal bass and down-swooping drones, "Nightflight (nonstop to kaos)" by The Mover presents Frontal Sickness is like a cybernetic version of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man". But it's not all mayhem. Six Mullahs' "Persian Lover" is an Islam-otronic mood piece. Project AE's "Whales Alive" is an extraordinary, undulating soundscape: stereo-panning slow beats, brief arias of whale song, tidal synths, a terra-technic bass that glows like the Earth's core. Imagine "Once In A Lifetime" if Talking Heads had been ripping off Kraftwerk rather than Can.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Blues
might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh
music on the planet, but James’ original “Devil” --just his piteous keening
voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The
lyric surpasses “Love Like Anthrax” with its anti-romantic imagery of love as
toxic affliction, a dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest,
to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while, but “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild
geese from the west”). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich
tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as “I’d Rather Be The Devil”
on Solid Air (Island,
1973) not only equals the original’s intensity but enriches and expands the
song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive
into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the
band’s surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk;
Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now
and then--“so much evil”, “stole her from my best friend… know he’ll get lucky,
steal her back”--but mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like this black
gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor
transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson’s bass injects
pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn’s
needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture.
Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the
young James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a
Silent Way, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”:
the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb
bliss. The two halves of Martyn’s drastic remake also correspond to a battle in
the singer’s soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.

Ten
Records that Changed Me (thing done for a German magazine in the mid-2000s if I recall right)

1/ Sex
Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, 1977

Awoke me
to belief in rock as a revolutionary, world-historical force - a faith I've
still not yet fully shaken off.

2/ Ian
Dury and the Blockheads, New Boots and Panties, 1978

Awoke me
to the possibilities of rock as poetic language (Dury) and awoke in me a
feeling for funk and disco (Blockheads).

3/ Public
Image Ltd, Metal Box, 1979

Awoke me
to the power of bass weight and dub space,
something that would keep on reverberating across an entire continuum of
Jamaica-into-England music, from ska to UK garage.

4/ The
Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday, heard 1982/released 1967

Awoke me
to Sixties psychedelia and its mystical dreams of self-surrender and recovery
of the lost child within.

5/ The
Smiths, "This Charming Man", 1983

Awoke me
to Morrissey, the most charismatic frontman and fascinating pop intellect
since Bowie, and to the poignant glory of his refusal of the 1980s.

6/
Schoolly D, self-titled, 1986

Awoke me
to the fact that rap was the major new pop music art form of the Eighties,
avant-garde in form and almost Marxist in its coldhearted
dissection/dramatisation of the capitalist psyche.

7/
Beltram, "Energy Flash", 1990

Awoke me
to the dark Dionysian delirium of rave -- to the fact that techno was the new
punk, or new heavy metal - either way,
the rock of the future, and the future of rock.

8/ Omni
Trio, "Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)" , 1994

Awoke me
to the fact that jungle's breakbeat science was the major new pop artform of
the Nineties - regardless of whether it would ever become pop music in the
Top Ten hit sense (it wouldn't, but it would get around).

9/ Dem 2,
"Destiny ", 1997

Awoke me
to the fact that jungle's spirit of playful invention had migrated into UK
garage and especially its subgenre 2step, which this track defined and
blueprinted.

10/
Dizzee Rascal, "I Luv U", 2002

Awoke me
to the fact that grime (the UK finally coming up with its own ferociously
original counterpart to rap) was the major new pop artform of the first decade
of the 21st Century.